National ID cards are widely used for international travel in Europe. You just need to standardize them, so that every checkpoint doesn't have to support 200 weird national standards.
I think the digital portion is pretty standard nowadays (same as biometric passports, plus any national addons like e-signing on top of that). And physical features are customizable, but that’s atrue for passports as well.
you're talking about humans, a civilization that cannot fully win the decades-long fight for one portable charging format, and proposing all governments get on the same page about their passports?
The machine readable printed parts are covered by an international standard
ISO/IEC 7501-1 [1].
So despite your cynicism, all governments literally are on the same page about passports.
What do people think organizations like ISO, ITU, ICAO etc do other than exactly this sort of standardization process of human activities that are common across national boundaries?
National ID cards are evil. They are not a thing in my country and there would be very very strong opposition if they were seriously proposed (including riots, like when vaccine mandates were imposed on a subset of the population a few years ago). The passport is the only thing remotely close to a national ID, and a good proportion of the population do not have one. Standardizing a national tracking ID so foreign powers can know everything about you and sell it to further enrich their oligarchs? Not a chance.
